Only One Went Through the Green Door

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Graduate Thesis Collection Graduate Scholarship

2019

Only One Went through the Green Door

Rachel Sahaidachny Butler University

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Only One Went Through the Green Door

______Poems by Rachel Sahaidachny

Only One Went Through the Green Door Poems By Rachel Sahaidachny

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing to the Department of English at Butler University.

April 2016

contents

Introduction Drawing from the Dark

Poems

Make 2 i. I cannot drive to her house 4 The Road 7 Roadside with Ditch Flowers 8 Found Relics Near Garage and Water 9 Homeless 10 Self-reflection 11 Receiving a Letter From My Mother, I Remember Her 12 When She Comes to My House I Feel Like Weeping 13 Linda 14 ii. I’ve had enough of death 16 Transatlantic: A Family History 17 An Apparition Brings Vacancy 20 Suryeing the Palm 21 Falling from Her Body 22 Renewal 23 Skin Branches 24 The Scattering Blooms 25 Raptors Fight above the Road 26 The Sky Turns Orange on the Eaastern Side at Twilight 27 Medusa Peers into the Well 28 Defining the Sky 29 What I Really Wanted Was a Garden of Lilacs 30 Matryoshka 31 Through the Lilac's Draping Blooms 32 Keen Dissolve 33 Cloud See Sun 34 Tiamat 35 American Domestic 36 Apple 37 Living with the Alien 38 In A Pool Under No Moon 39 iii. I am no mother 41 The Rosary of Clipped Wings 42 Cave Cricket 43

She and I 44 Childhood 45 Syringa Vulgaris 46 Brown Sky 47 The Rosary of Clipped Wings 48 Mirror Moon 51 For My Mother in the Drain 52 Vivisection 53 I brush my hair to shed the dead 54

Drawing from the Dark

—so we said to the somewhat: Be born— & the shadow kept arriving in segments Brenda Hillman, “Equinox Ritual with Ravens and Pines”

Lately, at times when I read Plath (The Collected Poems) the poems seem overwritten. The first time I experienced this thought it really shocked me. I wondered what changed—how could I

(and why would I) criticize of any of her work? I realized that in some of her poems I was more aware of the effort it took to make the language lovely than of what the poem was saying, as though

I was utterly distracted by the spell of it. I considered that the criticism perhaps had more to do with some thread of expectation in my own work—and a worry about my in general melodramatic, and overdramatized inclination. This drive to make things not “boring.”

Overwriting is an attempt to escape the personalized, to infiltrate the impersonal space and achieve a “larger than your life resonance,” in effort to communicate the abstract. In my drafts of poems the images sometimes seem obscured by the language: a thickening, a stuttering of the line, a sudden insertion (perhaps leading to a rejection of the poem’s intention), an overdone redundancy of the subject, rather than a declaration. Lavish language for coded work. It’s been a difficult journey to find the lines which contain weight equal to charge and beauty. This is important, because I have a narrative and not just a bunch of tricky or fascinating images. I have something to coax from within. Perhaps I should have been reading more Rich.

The quest in my writing poems is to write balanced between the personalized and the impersonal space—to protect the self but use the personal. Ellen Bryant Voight spoke on the persona of the poem, and difficulty of the subjective in the poem versus the individualized when she visited the Efroymson. “Great poems instill some essence of human experience.” She advised: write poems using personal memory and charged language to create the subjective experience, but the

i private must be isolated protected. Who is the lens the poem comes through? How do you view the poem separate from the self? The concept is the poem does not disclose self, it discloses experience.

Sometimes it takes a lot of writing and fancy lines before a poet can write about experiences without the explicitness of the self.

At first I found it very difficult to use I in poems. I was secret, and didn’t want to be shown.

Often, in a case for I, the imperative would assert itself on my pages, trying to give the I some directive, or instructions. Years ago when I met Alice Friman and she learned a bit about my narrative she recommended, “write in the third person when it’s difficult to write.” Then, at

Conversations, when Ellen Bryant Voight spoke of the personalized poem, she mentioned the same thing, write in third person when the material is personal.

I was frustrated, so many of my poems were entirely obscured by high lyricism, and surreality—language and image that I loved, but which I was overusing. What was on the page had a shimmer to it, like a dream—but like a dream it would fade into the obscure. What seemed electric and intensely interesting before was fading into boredom and leaving me utterly dissatisfied with poems.

Over the summer at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poets Workshop, as Sharon

Olds stood in front of us ready to read her poems she said, “Just now the little voice in me was telling me not to do this, that the poems are no good. But then I looked out and saw all of your wonderful loving faces, and I knew I could stand here and read you my poems.” For me it was really incredible to hear someone whose rich and personal poems have been with me through the years admit to the same struggles—it is difficult to face the past, the world, the poems.

Over the last year I began writing in the third person, and I developed the narrative of she and I. She and I have ties to reality, but both are also fabrications (from Daisy Fried: “Consider every poem to be a persona poem. None of it is true”), and because of their intimate and haunted

ii relationship I found room to use the lyricism I love while giving the poems a clear emotional center and drive that tackled the themes I wanted to explore. Finally, there was a ridge to balance on.

Landscape also proved a useful tool to cross the barrier between inside world and outer.

Recently in a talk given by Marianne Boruch, she said, “Place is where the writer begins to see.”

The details of a place may engage in a subtle shift, and quiet materialization of the inner or outer conflict. The inner-self and the past-self become present through the images. “If it’s not inside person talking to inside person it’s not a poem,” (Donald Hall); existence is a form of art. Consider

Yeats’s double gyre: history, thought, and memory entangled with the body, the soul, and senses; the crossing spiral lines—inner and outer world occupy the same space. Each spiral ascends and descends. Poetry crosses both spirals. The consciousness in my poems struggles with the boundaries between the past and the present., treading both realms in a sometimes disorienting desire to allow each to exist at the same moment. At time lines float on the page, unpunctuated, because they are spiraling between intentions and emotions.

I write from body and place and attempt to bridge the exterior with the interior. I still remember, when I was young, the first time I ever stood outside, under a sky falling into darkness because of gathering clouds, and I was at the side gate, next to the street. I had to stop and watch, and feel the fizzle of the light rain on my cheeks. There’s a parking lot across the street, so I could see a lot of the sky, and I had this feeling inside—a sudden dissolving of my skin, the outside poured into me, and I wrote a poem. A little lyric about living in that exact moment, and the world pouring in: “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” (T.S. Elliot), a pure moment of existence. When I write from place I often sense an unnamed tension, but a sinuous threat prevails in the sense that the place will disappear, and I must write it into existence.

Dean Young said, “Songs make sense in terms of ways that are not logical or narrative.” I still engage in surreal images, and lyrical language to draw out the unknown. I might leap away and

iii leave a line or scene before it is complete, I might let an image or declaration float, leave some part of the poem to exist between the phrases and the silences. Some might call a poem an interrogation.

How do you interrogate a shadow?

For me surrealism is not a tool, but a part of the narrative; and I tend toward chaotic movements in the poems—which is not necessarily a strength, and in fact I have worked to negate a lot of the confusion and chaos by finding some anchor to entrench the subject. The drive to be chaotic I think comes from the disordered history of my emotional world, and in allowing myself to write anything at all. The poem unfolds its own knowledge in its own space. These are the doors it enters and leaves. Do I stay close or do I leap? Someone once told me the poem can’t enter the same door it came in…but people prefer a softer exit. The first poets I read were Neruda and

Sexton, and I read them completely, utterly, over and over again, when I was fifteen, sixteen, and finally began reading whole collections of poetry.

There is a chaos captured on their pages, a woundedness, and beauty, disclosures of disorientation, and disillusionment. Poems which explore sensuality by exposing the rift between life and the soul, and the will, and of belonging.

I admire the way that Brenda Hillman’s work sifts through the world: the personal, the political, historical, and nature slipping into line together. Often, I don’t want to be handed a poem that does all the thinking for me. I like a poem that lingers, excites a questioning in me. Life brims uncertainly. The only thing we know is the details. What Sharon Olds writes seems to make herself and her history solid, then I see some moment of life in a new previously unforeseen way. Her use of metaphor stretches the image and creates a stained glass window: all the parts filled in with just a bit of different shade—everything that already was, but I couldn’t see. Her similes and metaphors bring these unknown connections to light. Their poems are written on the page, but exist partly in my mind—through the act of reading. Poetry is communal, and a living art.

Recently it seems like so many poems I like from the popular magazines are full of moon and blood and bone and stars and mouth. Of course, I love these words, and they appear often in my writing, too. For a couple of years I even took blood out of every poem—because it seemed to be in all of them. Of course, these words represent so well the interconnection of poet to life to land and universe, and act as tethers to the drifting spirit—the tiny ghost within who has the slippery mouth. The words bring concrete to the abstract, and also comfort and familiarity to the page—

Roethke’s and Plath’s (among others) poems are brimming with them. Working through the common language of the unconscious we are bound in their concrete simplicity; but perhaps further investigation is required to break up these archetypal impulses. Sometimes I think the words are a stand in for a greater image that has yet to be worked out or unveiled. Perhaps an incineration of archetypal language is required to get to the root. Perhaps those words just mask—create a conglomerate expression rather than explore the individual. Or, maybe they act as some kind of shield. I look at the words on my page and some days they never seem strong enough. I wonder what is it that I want (but what does the poem want!?)—and I remember that I lived in a dome of rejection; I am trying to climb out. I used the words that have pulled me through the world until now. I admire Roethke’s wanderings through language, and he did achieve that balance—delving into green shadow, and loosening to “bang and blab.” It can be difficult to sense when you are using a word just because it is familiar and brings comfort in a shadowed and lonely scene. I imagine the thousands of poems being built with this same vocabulary…is it literary tradition? Or just what’s comfortable, what is easily within reach? Must watch for that.

My truth is wired into the fractures, but I have been trying to make more declarations.

Some poems seem impossible to write. They linger in the shadows. I must find a way to coax them out. The charged language, the imagery make-up the markers. It is not enough to allow the poem to

v lay undisclosed and languishing in its own dense silence. Find the form for it to exist. Know that it will hide in familiar language. Keep pressing the line forward.

only one went through the green door

Make

Mother may I make a clover chain may I braid my hair and sleep on it may I count the waves may I wade your linseed oil streams may I breathe

~ you kept turning off the light saying the light was bad, there’s something wrong with the light— a little mineral spirit bored into your head I’ll wipe everything clean it said I’ll wipe everything

~ we walked next to ruins in a park: you caught a toad, stuck it in my hand hold it flat I didn’t want to touch its clammy skin you clutched my wrist only the wild seed grows— close your mouth to the water, close your ears, daughter

Mother may I play upside down may I scrub your frown may I unbutton me unbutton you may I swallow your stew Mother may I whorl beneath your full moon gaze— may I cut you out of my face

I cannot drive to her house

I won’t enter her sparse rooms and see her towels placed on the floor for seats see the words of the Shema scrawled on her walls.

She keeps no company except her dog, for months she has lived in a hotel bi-nightly, or less—only on weekends, before that it was she and the dog in the car eating cheap take-out sandwiches sharing the greasy meat from inside waxed paper but she has a place now. I won’t join them for the meal she’s fixed.

This time it hasn’t been a decade yet since I last saw her she is widowed, her estranged Alaskan man dead.

We moved from empty room to empty room in the cold Colorado cabin where she shut the heat off my fingers numbed as we stacked boxes in the box truck.

I handled hundreds of packets of rosy duck sauce and fermented soy sauce from the kitchen’s drawers, awkwardly, they slid through my fingers into the last bag of trash.

The drawer for knives burst with throw-away plastic utensils still in cellophane, crumpled napkins,

4 paper packets of salt and pepper wedged into the cracks.

I would’ve rather closed it.

In the closet I found a blue nylon duffle bag too hefty to lift, contents cascading: water, canned food with the labels peeled, a hammer, poles, and tent stakes.

The longer we are apart the more I recognize her flash in me:

I smile amused when I am not a stunted laugh her jangled tone shapes my mouth. She bubbles behind my eyes makes the whole room foreign. I pinch my nails into my palm to become me again to think like me.

Think like her they will hold everything against you they will send you to the doctor they will close you in a room they will leave us with midnight thoughts like a tourniquet around my throat— a dark stone turns in me.

I twist and turn my stone within

I clean it with spit polish obsidian

someone taught me to breathe half-breaths to keep my lungs clenched he says You know you’re grunting between each breath yes I say yes

I suffocate in the shallows my airless head drifts away from her away from me give me your night eyes give me your seeds he doesn’t hear her in my flattened voice none of them do

6 the road

and the woman and the road and the road and woman in her car woman and her car with her dog and the road and her dog and her breath and the car and the lots and parks in dark sleeping in her car and the woman and her dog living in her car and the woman who believes believes the woman who flees flees past town by town flees suburbia flees tourist nation and believes someone everything is fake who believes she flees to a good place woman who believes she’s doing ok living in her car with her dog all night i dreamed about shit and piss all night i dreamed about leaking from my guts i woke up burning in my head my veins it’s always the same as though inside i hold a thought locket all night staring across the gap vast country threading my brain to her flash all night on the road gray mirrors on pavement and sky of her eyes always always peering into her lord peering into suffering attached to peering into suffering attached to suffering vast expanses of peering at her lord like a locket attached to suffering peering gray pavement peering at stop lights suffering signals that say don’t walk holding onto steering wheel her eyes mirrored in the rear view

Roadside with Ditch Flowers

Stop the car

in the pitch beside

the ditch: Daucus carota

finger their curdled

blooms and needle stems

that only the fat flies see

feed on Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa)

avoid their caution yellow cymes

Wrap your throat with Morning Glory

lick drizzle from cobalt cups

Do Not Mow

Native Restoration posted on a sign the fat flies insistent as lights too shiny at night little torpedoes of unsevered-wings besprinkle my split platter my bone snarl

Sarcophagidae

I spy your button eyes with my button eyes—

Relics Near Garage and Water

By the river clothes were strung to dry on the low branches of trees.

She found the river beside a cavernous parking garage, behind a hotel.

She parked her car full of everything that’s hers: change of shoes black faux leather with cracked soles, mini-shampoos, small soaps wrapped in paper, a box of maxis despite her years of menopause, a stack of post cards she won’t send, a jar of wish bones and feathers, a can full of paint brushes, one tea cup trimmed in gold leaf adorned with a rising rose.

She parked in the corner on the first floor where light can’t penetrate the tar dark gleam. Her chest congested she prayed, Lord when will I leave here. Echo of hollow garage: her face pressed to the car window. Lord.

I’ve collected river mussels from the bank. I cleaned them in my mouth sucked the sand and spit the shells into my palm to slough the echo off.

Homeless

She chose to live on wildflowers and clover

She chose to drink mud from ditches beside the road some might question my choice to say chose.

She chose not to take her injections.

In her eyes so blue everything she sees and doesn’t drowns—

It’s possible I will never see her she always moves farther away while she wanders I wait for news of her death hope she might dissolve unnoticed except for the bit of her

I can’t spit out biting the thick of my tongue red split in the white coating I choke every morning my head says quit—

Self-reflection

lately she only notices the shadow floating beside her—in a mirror or puddle or automatic door of the grocery the bulletproof window at a gas station as she turns to get into the car— shroud imitates. one afternoon while driving she notices a dusky mark on her forearm. she squints closely at it. does this arm belong to her? she licks her skin. she feels uneasy and smells turned yogurt or rancid noodles. she keeps measuring its edge with her eyes. she avoids all reflective surfaces focuses on the blacktop stretching before her. beside her a silver suburban blares its horn as she sits too long lost gazing at the accumulating shadow in the clouds above the green light. It will make everything shiny. It will make everything stare back. she must not touch the spot on her arm though the pulse in the bruise has become a gong. it’s a blurred moment. it reminds her of a door she once bumped into when she was saying goodbye— when she thinks goodbye she looks at her eyes reflecting in the rearview her own eyes telling her where to drive telling her to drive to the next where.

Receiving a Letter from My Mother, I Remember

her eggs— burgundy beet-stained and drained of albumen, the yolk pricked.

What have I done now? she said.

She carefully drove the needle into each end of the shell.

It took a lot of force to blow the membrane out.

I breathe I breathe I breathe in

I admit I don’t know her well.

Blue iris is my mother’s favorite flower my mother’s eye has.

I am sick and of poor health, she said.

To make the egg blue she used vinegar and cabbage. Soaked her onion peels for orange, melted wax to trace the shapes onto the shell. She could make them bold or delicate.

I have tried to love you, to let you know how much I love you.

If I wanted to burn my hand I’d burn my hand

form a blister on my skin and then press the pin in and watch it seep. This is how we heal, she told me.

You don’t have to drain the egg just let it sit eventually what’s inside will dry out.

Eras later with a gentle shake the soft weight of emaciated yolk will cause a dust rattle.

When She Comes to My House I Feel Like Weeping

She sits at my kitchen table. I make her bone broth soup with beets in it as she stares through my back.

Outside coral skies: it’s winter. In the garden leaves hang limp as peeled skins.

She doesn’t speak to me just sits at the place with the placemat as her dog licks and licks the floor.

I’m faced with the bloodless mess of red beet flesh on my knife and cutting board. It digs at my chest: these are things we passed down, an old recipe. It disintegrates in me.

I heard the door bang and bang I heard the door as you left and left and left

I could tell the woman that—but she doesn’t look at me. She whispers to her dog she wouldn’t be here except it’s winter and the flowers have gone underground.

If she had something to say to me I would write it down. Write it over and over.

Linda

Linda of the vacant blue Linda chewing her lips Linda of the talking mirror Linda of slashed canvases Linda in her bare apartment Linda of empty cans Linda of the blue iris Linda counting ragged flags Linda drinking lethal water Linda of the quiet execution Linda of the wild grass destitute and living in a car a race to erase everything that is Linda all manner of mother crumbled inside

ii.

I’ve had enough of death she says, and fools you dragging in the wagon behind her two corpses identical to her except for their empty goblet eyes

Transatlantic: A Family Story

She says:

They hold a gun to my father’s face because he wants to pass the line they say women and children only

I lose my grip on my sister’s hand as we cross the river water surrounds me: I hear my mother and her sister crying I hear my father crying seated in the long grass alone among the bodies of the other young men.

“They let me go,” he says, “they let me go.”

We hide in the woods so long we’re so hungry we dig a grave the men must walk ahead I can’t feel my legs to disappear outside so long no one would recognize us.

We cross the river again black crest bobbing my neck my father holds my hand

I drag my sister behind me like a doll. I feel bones through my father’s palm—

He says:

Inside the concrete block building everything stone-washed dim beneath flickering fluorescents we are pinned against a chain link fence, our shoulders bruise as we crush.

They face us from the other side in their uniforms holding buckets.

Her dark hair falls into her face over her dark sweater her hand reaches to catch crumbs they toss from their buckets for our breakfast after our sleepless night on the floor of this shelter built for refugees. Detained, our skin thickened from dehydration pinch us, watch our flesh spike—

She says:

The rain tastes charred. My mother calls it ruin rain it leaves streaks of ash on our skin.

Somewhere a home is burning, once it was ours.

Mother says she has been hungrier she has eaten charred lumps of clay, this is what to feed the children.

They say on the other side of the water we won’t have to dig graves.

When I go to school I don’t speak your language when I go to school I don’t wear underwear you show me how to swing how my skirt billows my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth you send me for speech therapy we changed our names we sound familiar we are Mary and Nancy and John now our tongues move foreign in our mouths.

We have a box of photos and names of the ones we will never see again.

How we are burned by hot steel in the factory and return to work.

How you say the women from my country are crazy how the men sing and sing and I dance and I dance my arms streamers through the air—

He says:

What about my mouth is different than your mouth what about my words makes them less than when I yell out my tongue falls, I bite it so hard I feel it in my spine imagining my ribs splintered as if I keep breathing deeper you will open the gate—

An Apparition Brings Vacancy

A woman with blood on her lips is stealing my groceries.

She places my baby in a brown paper bag. She walks out the supermarket front door

Into the squint white sunlight. The bag bursts to fire. She holds it

Above her shoulders as it crumbles to ash. My baby blisters, tumbles to dust.

All I see of the woman is her shadow. All I remember of the baby is hunger.

Surveying the Palm

I am always settling my palm against any solid surface.

It doesn’t come naturally to me to wave my hand half open moonflower at dawn.

I sleep with my hands clenched— in the morning my swollen knuckles make a twist around a dog leash, a door knob, a steering wheel excruciating.

One night I woke to find both hands balled beneath my chest. Now I hold a rabbit foot, fur eroded, by its chain bracing myself for the dull blade

I press into the heart line’s blue mountain shadow on the edge of my palm. I know there is birth there.

Falling from Her Body

Hear the brain bang on a rock knock knock

The womb is a picnic shelter

I unhinge both elbows

Tinnitus is a warship

My cochlear canal in spasms a slug plugs cartilage

Air shoves into me

I am wresting breath out

The rush of blood vessels: a million moth wings

All the insects tucked into tunnels

White breath of loneliness

Gas rising across stars

Renewal

The vulture lifts off the dead thing in the road and hulks gargoyle large on the gutter of a house.

She flicks her wine dark wings at me— not at me, at the spring breeze, her eyes scanning for what we kill when we drive: sunbaked remains, dried gristle.

There’s blood streaked on her beak almost dark enough for me to see. She’ll clean the bones, clear the road.

I pass her slow. She hisses, Daughter, daughter.

Skin Branches

You asked: if we existed in a world without men would you miss me?

We slept with the air between us you cursed and threw punches as you dreamed.

I woke to a dark room and the skin of your back etched with branches

I hushed the worry whirlpooling in me you sleeping so still almost dead. I kept blinking as the branches fanned out, deepening across your back into a tree.

I my dream the walls were made of silver bark and peeled away by children: whatever limb I had I handed over.

I walked naked in the bare light and wept in the window.

I was afraid my neighbor saw my breasts all his dogs died of exposure.

I wrote on the wall to remember:

I like to watch the hawk streak in the evening— none of my poems are about nature.

The Scattering Blooms

Our flooded garden ripples as though you’re walking through.

I hold out my palm to the vanishing rain.

Whose idea was it to keep a garden anyway? I smell roses or tobacco.

Moths cluster beneath drenched crowns.

Star anise you planted delivers succulent spires of musk.

We spent the afternoons watching the Ruby-throated Hummingbird thrust its small shape into blue sage blooms.

Rose haze tenderizes the atmosphere.

Low moan of wasp near my shoulder—is it you?

Raptors Fight above the Road

Tree limbs shudder above the road, an object explodes from the branches. It’s living. Two vultures grip each other in claw, in talon embrace, they fall and twist then bound onto another bough.

“What is that?” you ask me. “Looks like buzzards,” I say, thinking the birds of prey are the same species. You google buzzard on your phone, and what’s pictured is too small. “Not right,” you say.

We sit here every night, on the porch at sunset, like leeches soaking in the last rays of daylight.

It’s difficult to explain how brutal the birds look, a murky mass of feathers pitch dark forms in the hackberry, wings spread, then cocked crookedly in their ritual fight. Or is it romance?

Through the rustle the road is silent. Not a neighbor drives by.

Sometimes I hear them shouting next door, from the kitchen, the bedroom. And I wonder if the neighbors hear us too.

The vultures bustle in the tree I wrecked after an argument. I grabbed it and ripped. It splintered, but didn’t break off. I looked back at the house and wondered if you would come after me.

What did I want with a broken tree? Perhaps to hang from it. No one saw. The street was quiet. And I slipped away back to our house, leaving the wreckage.

The Sky Turns Orange on the Eastern Side at Twilight

Scepters of fir descend the mountain until their edges fade. I smell of metal—my tin fingers, silica shoulder.

What are you mountain what are you chest what are you breath I can’t see yet fills me. What is this I hold onto I don’t mean to hold onto. Needles cling to pines. They plunge in silence and make a patch on the ground of silence. As I walk eyelashes shed on my cheeks. Follower of leaf prints in a land without fallen leaves— I turn my hand over for a whisper of thunder: a faint thud in my breast when I undress and don’t want to be seen.

Medusa Peers into the Well

Everything sharp surrounds my heart

I needle my heel into earth

I eat green moth

I stare into well

I put every memory I’m sick of looking at

I put mud

Hello lost stones

I slither in rain

Belly prunes

Skin carcass yellow

I see loveliness in snakes

But my crown of hiss slid

White-lips with starfish bruise cheek

Gray nails, purple-skin fingertips

My womb pit of plum

My heart snail twists in its shell

Barnacle eyes have no reflection

Moss grows that needs no sunlight

Defining the Sky

On the phone you ask me about the stars. I say, “The sky’s still light.” See cirrocumulus, see cirrus, see cirrostratus.

Beneath the clouds the mountain is creased like mud hardened and scraped from the bottom of someone’s shoe.

In Indiana it’s the season of the glow worm flicker flies fire at dusk you pretend somehow it’s for us.

If I were there you would point to the largest clouds: see cumulonimbus, see nimbostratus, see stratocumulus.

I am impressed with an unpunctuated blue or the gray line of an impending front.

At night you’d show me the brightest blinks of light— a world with 67 moons.

I say, “These pinecones are extraterrestrial.” I wanted to touch them, but I refrained. I’m used to a softer structure of trees.

What I Really Wanted Was a Garden of Lilacs

In the stony soil of our yard even forsythia won’t grow. I planted a jasmine though I knew it would only last one season. It never bloomed.

The hummingbirds won’t visit our feeder. I took it apart and found the fake red posies filled with ant corpses—

Lately, the garden stinks like carcass. The bees on the coneflowers replaced by black flies with juicy blue-metal eyes.

You couldn’t find the source of the smell nor did you sense it. You sprayed bleach on the moss-slickened border bricks. I showed you where to avoid the spider’s nest.

We sat quiet as lichen together in the lawn beneath navy sky laced with clouds. Toads hiccupped and leapt in the crabbed grass around us.

On your phone you find a house for sale. You show me pictures: a bungalow, arts and crafts, back patio surrounded by raised beds, a koi pond glistens oily green full of slippery orange bodies. I shake my head, say, “You’ll have to do way better.”

Matryoshka

There was not a spring just a doll locked in a box

Hating just one person can make you hate everyone

Over and over pull the doll apart inside is the same doll and she too splits open

Through The LiLac’s Draping BLooms

I part the blossoms with my finger and peer between the petals

I take a twig in my teeth and gently push where branches split.

In the center of the tree I find some her that isn’t me— pale, wearing clover in a crown. Some her that looks fuzzy in the dusk.

Incapable of stampede. Her veins lavender pulse.

She plucks dust motes from a glade, collects a palm full of pollen.

After a while she smothers it all over her body.

Keen Dissolve

The Sweet Gum tree had star-shaped leaves and radiant star-ball seeds limbs curved like women swirling abundance of arms and legs swirling abundance of arms and legs

I cut it down. It’s freedom to move one body away from another.

I felt something yesterday, my liver was tender— thrum red haze thrum spent magenta beating.

Dreaming of death is dreaming about saving people and falling. I know a story about the sky:

Her split lungs filled with blood. I didn’t invite her in. She wanted me to.

She won’t open the envelope I sent or open my back and see its blank dark slick.

Cloud See Sun

Come up the rutted road come up the mountain lava cliffs look-out horse pasture plateau juniper-laced stones big as gods weathered pale.

Iron streaks the slickrock.

Beneath gold-leafed aspens grazing cattle eyes shining black match slits in bark’s unfurling white.

This thin air alters my face until gray veils my eyes.

Should I pray? It’s difficult to build a fire, fire just goes out.

Tiamat

no longer will I fight the wind when he blows into my mouth my teeth fall like stones & litter the darkness every nerve dazzles down into my fallopians my ova melt like berries slink away from me

let me be viper let me be asp to engulf him until I splutter small gusts into the nothing above us

American Domestic

you on your brother’s old cat scratch couch I in my mother’s kitchen rocker and then you leave and I bake nothing but burned crusts falling through the traps

Apple

I kneel on motel carpet gripping datura slivered with light there’s a bible to put one hand on reflected in the tv my face dims the screen the headboard like open wings behind me as if I were shadow imprinted in a lithograph stone oil darkens the road outside my door the engine of a truck sounds like a hurt animal— in this room, glare through the curtain: 3 am ghost sun across his cheek the apple on the table next to me his palm held out, he says, I know what it is to forgive but not how to.

Living With the Alien

It has two purple mouths for eyes. Two translucent tongues loll beside my chin—it’s tentacle shoots through my ventricle, wraps around my spine like a newborn’s grip.

Yellow fluid trickles from its fanged mouth panting beside my ear where I hold my cellphone and pretend to listen to him between the crackles and pops of gnawed cartilage.

I tell him I just want to go home and read but instead I sleep or drink wine. My dog waddles next to me, buries its head in covers.

Every night at 3 a.m. I wake up my fist balls around the alien. Blood stiffens on my neck.

I am getting sick of the dampness in the middle of my chest.

I am full of words like: clean, bills, eat, workout.

I want to feel electric as a star— I listen to it speak between the nibbles: fever, galaxy, darkness attrition, pestilence, ice melt. I wonder if I might be losing my grip as I pour cabernet into my cup. Probably I’m too old to be a mother now, and it has siphoned most of my organs. A womb is just extra space inside.

In a Pool Under No Moon

when he presses me when he holds my head holds my hair down with his fingers wrists chest my voice slivers to ribbon no air no breath a trail of snot leaks from my face when I cough and cough the water out, my whole body burns with suffocation there is no exit from the pool, and no end where my feet can touch the bottom feel the coarse concrete scrape small pruned toes where sun dances and shimmers aqua streamers on the bed and I can see the vacuum and where the danger is I wouldn’t mind mucus slicking my face because I’m the one trying to hold my breath longer and longer and he never told me to

III.

I am no mother— when I think of living I think of bones.

We all try to undo ourselves like a daughter with a mother like a daughter without one.

The Rosary of Clipped Wings

In the sanctuary of no-constellation she meditates on plains of nettle piped through with shadow her prayer darkened with no-words— who doesn’t trust the sound of her voice who hears it and doesn’t like it because it doesn’t sound like what it sounds like inside her head—

can never be too careful keeping the unsaid unsaid even the candle glass might be listening even the mercury

Cave Cricket

Somewhere there must be a mother on the street who loves me, a mother on the street. My mother— nails peeling off. Old blood stains yellow the seat of her jeans. She won’t take money only food.

She wants to be a red- winged black bird perched upon pussy willow watching horse tails swat flies.

Black bird has no daughters. The sky opens up: red wings bear down plotting to fill my mouth with mud, shovel it down my throat.

In the marshes she shit seeds into me. She resurrects herself in the damp grass, then prays.

She passes judgment: on a field mouse, percussed toad, black beetle. Even mud. What are we doing? Were we formed wombless or born with only half our hearts?

They will know us by the bones we leave. White daisies rising, star flower resilient.

Her softness comes in a web invisible, and stuck to my lips. I stroke my face but can’t find the threads.

She and I

Sometimes the I finds a way to bleed into the she but only one went through the green door and only one eats a regular breakfast. Neither one of them sleeps but they each have different reasons: she prays a lot all night through the night she believes God speaks or someone does, she has conversations with the room, or with her old brown dog which eats whatever she eats. She’s married to it and the empty room. She’s made her first solid commitment and I do not belong.

Childhood

I was the child with bright red paws

Among tree roots I slumbered

Waited decades for mother to come

Mother made me black lace

Taught me love is a bruise

What kind of home is it where children daydream

About being pets

My sister wanted to be a cat

I jumped around the house gnawing on cabbage

My nickname was bunny

She got skinny I got fat

ii.

In the closed space of the upstairs hallway

At night she crossed the threshold

She came into our room

And lay in bed with my sister

Said she wanted to be the girl again

Pretended she was one of us

iii.

At the end of the world the sun

Looming orange

I stand with my mother

Her eyes glazed black

Pools looking past me

“They’re all dead” I tell her

Our shadows erased in a flash

Of radioactive brilliance

We’ll be together she says

She digs her nails like pincers into my wrist

She hands me the blue cup with the poison in it

Syringa Vulgaris

—I was growing horns but they turned to twigs they grew magnificent green in the center they grew from my shoulders how they must have scratched my mother as I traveled from her inside out.

There is no such thing as a delicate scream. I would like to press her mouth until the air is out and press her and press her like blooms in our book: between the pages she kept violets and clover. I tried to press the lilacs but their woody stems wouldn’t flatten only bend—

Brown Sky

the sky turns brown in the evening unfamiliar ashen haze new depth to the spills of winter

I had to shovel and shovel to find her beneath the long driveway’s ice pelt whose skin is that tapered tawny light in the atmosphere snow falls one-sided on the tree the storm settles the freezing comes

I see the tracks – shadows in the snow leading towards the house beneath the reddish haze of street lamp the light slips off the edge of the road

I have hated every word my mother has given me

The Rosary of Clipped Wings

Your father is lying, and his father before him lied, your grandmother is lying, your other grandmother is lying, your aunts and your uncles are lying, the doctors are lying, your friends and my friends are lying, the government and the President are lying, the police are lying, your teachers are lying. Trust no one. Believe no one but me. ii. what an evil ugly girl you are what a hateful evil girl you’re full of hate you’re so miserable you’re embarrassing you know nothing nothing nothing listen to me you are so stupid you know nothing at all are you listening all you do is embarrass me how could you write this you don’t care about anything you don’t love me you’re stealing from me you’re the reason I can’t paint you’re stealing my ideas you look hideous don’t eat that you’re too fat why aren’t you eating this I made this for you you have no idea what I’ve done for you you don’t care for me at all you’re just full of lies you’re just like your father you’re just like them a liar you’re full of shit iii. if you don’t leave with me you’re going to Hell He’s going to destroy everything everyone will be dead just wait it’s happening none of this world will exist you won’t exist you don’t exist unless you come with me to the woods come with me we have to wait in the woods He’s coming for me and he’ll come for you too, if you come with me I wish I could make you see why don’t you see we have to wait in the woods with the bible

I love you so much I just want you to be saved.

iv.

Don’t come near me Raven I knew it was too late for you

Take this bible maybe it’s not too late

Everybody is going to be dead this world won’t be anymore it will be His as He provides for the birds of the field He provides for me.

You have no idea what I’ve been through but you’ll see don’t forget it’s hereditary.

Mirror Moon

Her last visit she seemed sexless dressed in layers of shabby black her thin head a floating skull detached from any mother.

She gave me a book for a baby— on its cover the moon had a face in a dazzling sapphire sky, she told me how I’d been loved by the Father – – no

I was a thief curled in her mind swiping out her dreams at night.

She threw the dishes at me she punched her hand through the storm door, through the bathroom mirror.

I know her divisions her black hair parted long the small bouquet of moles on her belly.

In the world behind the mirror: I see a halo moon above a metal rail— every memory silver plated every dinner perfectly ended without any personal disclosures.

For My Mother in the Drain

Occasionally you rise from the drain like a beetle.

I turn on the water, drown you again.

Tiny fungus fibers line the pipe. Your shed skin is pungent.

I pour bleach down the hole to mask the smell.

Sometimes your blue eye peeps at me to blink a message: Love beareth all things, belieth all things, endureth all things.

I jab at it with my pinky nail, force it back. Don’t tell me about love.

Vivisection

Through the doors the light disappears. Turning the corner, I find myself in shadows—

I see her body pressed between the glass, her abdomen sliced, divided see her dead and damp on the walls she’s hung it’s grotesque to see her spread like that her outline, her skin’s tenuous stretch, poke my arm with my fingertip, pinch my belly.

The color of her dulled by formaldehyde her organs and tissues brown and beige swirls—a trail of veins, like rocks, like agate.

What are we doing in this room with this corpse woman— is she mother or is she me?

She left me, she took the dog—

I brush my hair to shed the dead

strands and think how old hair isn’t lovely not like leaves falling in these winter nights of freezing fog only half the trees have lost their leaves discarded strands wrap around the brush handle find their way under the covers of the bed impossible to untangle every feeling in a day

I keep brushing but never shampoo I think tomorrow

I will dunk my head in the stream where the ice melts and leaves clump

I will let my knees sink deep into the umber then barefoot in the ripples wade trying to hear you coming in the rattling leaves.